Her Hands Are Her Mother’s Wings

Titli died because her blood had burnt in her veins, that is what the vaidhya ji said. Consumed by the heat of her soul, she jumped into the river. Nobody who was fond of Titli believed that a girl like Titli could, first of all, die at all. She had a natural faculty for existing too much. Secondly, that her soul could have dried up. She always looked dampened, in a pretty way, from inside, as if she was fuelled by a water turbine running inside her. Her brother told the vaidhya ji that her eyes were always watery. How could they possibly guess her soul was drying up? But Pammuri did not say anything, for she did not confuse the firewood for a water turbine. She knew the water in Titli’s eyes was vapour from the heat that her soul produced. She always knew that about her daughter.

Once when Titli was a baby, two strange things happened which Pammuri, for the longest time, believed were dreams. One day, when she was giving Titli a bath, she heard a faint crackling sound coming from inside her. She thought her daughter was doing tricks but no matter how much she tried to convince herself, she knew the sound was coming from inside her daughter, as if Titli had swallowed a dry leaf and then put it to flames. The second strange thing happened when Titli turned a year old. Murli was playing with her on the floor while Pammuri was hanging washed clothes to dry. She heard the boy’s faint laughter and came to see that Titli was changing the temperature of her hands that rubbed against her elder brother’s cheeks. At first, it was a playful gesture between the siblings but later, tiny bubbles had erupted on the young boy’s face, like ruptures in a sweetcorn on flames. Murli grew up, his mind narrowed to the realities with which he was introduced and slowly forgot the memory of that strange afternoon. But Pammuri remembered. And now, sitting next to her daughter’s dead body, she senses a funny feeling inside her. An organ has been taken out of her body. She will never find herself whole again, that is what everyone tells her. She is stroking her daughter’s sunken face and is wondering– when was the last time she felt whole? As far back as her mind goes, she has always felt an incomplete part of a fancied whole– a sleazy cut out from the viscous matter of a whole womb.

We mutilate our mothers and then grow up wondering, why do they hate us. Why do they love so angrily? Forgive me. The corridors of digression are too slippery.

#

When Titli returned home in pandemic, she told her mother about three recurring dreams:

A man watching her from the window as she pees in the bathroom.

Two trees running to catch a train.

A fish sleeping in her bed.

Pammuri scanned her daughter’s face, desperately searching for signs of cunning. She knew her daughter was capable of hurting her mother by saying inappropriate, bizarre things like these. But she would not say it out loud. She grabbed a bunch of red chillies and moved her fist around Titli’s head, chanting some prayers and plunged the contents on to a burning stove. The lump turned black and yet there was no smell of the burning chilli. This irresponsible girl had invited danger to their door. Someone had cast an evil eye on Titli. It happens in the cities too, said Pammuri. Maybe it was the pervert construction worker who worked on the top floor of a building next to Titli’s hostel. Titli did not tell Pammuri that he died in January, two months before she returned home in quarantine. The hostel cook said he stepped on a faulty wiring. Girls celebrated by taking long, relaxed showers, knowing there is nobody to watch them through the ventilation anymore. But when Titli went to bath, he was still there. His eyes were fixed on her body (she could not decide which part of it, for he was far) as he crouched on the floor with his hand wiping his sweat on regular intervals.

Perhaps, death loomed on her daughter, Pammuri thought. An old man with protruding bones, eyes empty and hands always full. That is how Pammuri imagined death, a father who never fails to show up for his children. Better than the ones Pammuri got for herself and for her children. But she couldn’t say it out loud. It would be an audacious thing to say. Her daughter would say such things better. Once, Pammuri overheard Titli telling the goats that her father loved her so much he killed himself so he could go up in heaven and bribe the gods to not kill his daughter before she has seen the ocean. She dragged her inside and branded her hand on Titli’s cheeks. That night, Pammuri dipped her burning hand into ice water and slept all night in the kitchen, she got cold the next day.

“Our daughter is a witch,’ she said to her husband in the dream.

He laughed and held Pammuri’s burning hand in his own. His hands were cold, tender and slippery like the bodies of the fish slithering in the river.

“At least, we know where she got it from,’ he said.

Pammuri shook her head. Titli is nothing like her. She speaks dangerously about the gods and talks back to the Shukuls and Dubeys. When the Durga statue of the village temple was mysteriously disfigured during Ramanavami, Pammuri knew in her heart that Titli had melted it with her hands alone. She would not have done it had she not seen Harindar Pandit insult Pammuri in the mela.

“But she also talks to the goats and the trees,’ reminded her husband.

Yes, and Pammuri does not understand it and yet, accepts it like the return of a habit forgotten long ago. She forgave Titli in her dream. It was easy to do it in her husband’s company. When the morning came, the memory of the dream faded. Only remained the heavy knots of loneliness stowed in her sleepy body.

#

Pammuri watched on YouTube how to cast off the evil eye. She could not go to Harindar pandit because her last Dakshina was due. He had called on Murli’s phone twice already. Rest of the  pandits lived far away into the village and most of them only attended to Brahmins. And Pammuri did not get along with her relatives who would go on to vocally blame her a year later for Titli’s death. She had offended the ancestors by sending Titli to college; ancestors and the equally revered village moneylenders. These dogs with tongues drooping, waiting for the arrogant cat to someday show up at their doors after running out of milk. But for some reasons, the spirit of the village river was so generous to Pammuri that her baskets were always full of fish, fresh and red, skidding tiny in the air as she put her stall in the town.

Take a fistful of salt. Make the person sit facing the east. Recite this mantra. Pammuri was menstruating. She called Murli to do it for her. Titli glanced at her brother performing the ritual coldly. She could have tried to talk to him but the goats bleated outside and distracted her. Her forehead was scraped by all that salt rubbing. Her mouth felt sticky with dried saliva. Her brother’s hands smelled of rotten fish but Titli did not mind it. She thought they were lucky the house always smelled of the fish, it ensured not just her survival but the possibility of a better life than just surviving. But she hated Murli. She wanted to tell him not to bother, for she would preserve the evil eye, whomever it was from, beneath her pillow and send it to his room in the night. She wanted to say it, if only to invite a slap from him. He should also spend a night by that pitcher of cold water, once.

At night, Titli told Pammuri the truth. She was not trying to play games with her mother. She did have those dreams. The water in her eyes looked yellow, reflected by the light of the oil lamp standing on the windowsill.

“Murli never believes anything I say,’ whispered Titli in the dark. “He has his own world of truths. Our castes are our gifts from the ancestors. The government is always right. We are fried like pakoras in refined oil with insects in a kadhai when we die. Women who wear jeans and do not marry never achieve baikunth. Our ancestors are laughing at bapu because maai is still living like a bride, with her long braid out to attract other men when she goes in the fish market– ”

Pammuri turned her head swiftly towards Titli.

“Did Murli say that to you?’

Titli opened her keypad phone to show a Facebook post on Murli’s account. You can tell a lot by what people choose to write on the internet these days, she explained to her mother. Pammuri frowned, “why do you use the internet? Did I give you the phone to play or to study?’ Titli put the phone away and inched closer to Pammuri, despite her sour sweat.

“I do not care about Murli. He is stupid. But I don’t like when even you do not believe me maai. If you think I am making up stories, then why do you send me to college to come back with more stories?’

Pammuri did not have the answer so she took the usual escape. Do not call your brother stupid. Titli was annoyed.

“Murli is stupid. Illiterate. Baklol. Why must I not say it when the only two people in this room know it is true?’

“Do not talk back to me Titli,’ Pammuri said sharply.

Titli moved away. Her mother annoyed her so much. She was envious of the girls she saw in the city hanging out with their mothers, laughing in English, sipping coffees together. But then, maai too would like coffee had she been introduced to it when she was a girl. Everything unexplainable could be explained that way– one had a bad childhood. But if that is so, how would Titli’s daughter justify Titli’s erratic, annoying activities in the future. For there would certainly be erratic, annoying activities when Titli crosses thirty. How do you know, asked Titli playfully. Pammuri’s voice betrayed her smile.

“You already show signs.”

“Where?’

“In your gait, in your eyes, and there is something else too,’ said Pammuri.

“What is it maai?’

The heat one feels in your vicinity. But Pammuri did not say it, for acknowledging it would have betrayed the obliviousness that Pammuri had feigned all these years. Titli stared at her mother’s face, taut with thoughts Titli would never have access to. She would die before reaching the age when daughters become sympathetic, if not entitled, to their mothers’ private thoughts. Titli thought maai looked like a film heroine under the trick of the flickering oil wick. She did not want to start the argument about Murli again and so she slept without telling Pammuri that she really liked her long braids. Falling down till her waist curved in the sides, her plaits were always wet at the ends, dampened at the river while she fished. Long, fertile, endangered, like the currents of the river Pampa. Titli read about it in a book and wondered if her mother knows there is a place called Kerala in the country. Titli knew of a few women in the village who understood the world in a tripartite structure– there is Bihar which is also the same as India. There is Dilli where crimes happen and the rest of the world is Amrica. But Pammuri was different. Even though she could not think in the worldly ways that Titli could, she did think it was important for Titli to study and earn money and go to see the ocean. That kind of thinking did reflect a degree of intelligence, Titli believed.

#

After Titli’s death, Pammuri finds it difficult to sleep. The unending days of death rituals which kept reminding her of the painful reality are now gone;back in her room, she opens the window to let the moon slip in as she pleases and make her bed conducive to daydreams. Pammuri cannot survive without tenderness anymore. She seeks them in dreams and in memories of Titli when she was a child. She would always play with the neighbours’ goats. Other fisherwomen were fond of Titli too, playing with her and offering yellow flowers to the little girl who would crawl on all fours, chew on the flowers and bleat. Meyyyy, Meyyyy, Meyyyy, Maai… Pammuri wakes from the dream, startled and in sweat. Titli had turned into a fish and was sleeping beside her.

Pammuri gets off the bed. She looks out the window at the sky, still purple with the lingering evidences of the night. Murli is supposed to go to the market at the crack of dawn. They need to increase their sale now that the quarantine has slackened off. But he wouldn’t wake up until noon, hungry and in a bad mood (and also locked up in his room but we would come to that later). For now, Pammuri takes a bath at the handpump in her petticoat, picks the knife from the kitchen and leaves for Harindar Pandit’s house. Her bangles sound sweeter in the dawn, like the sound of bells tinkling around the necks of buffaloes. Only Sujan is out untying his cattle, the rest of the village is still sleeping. It is too early for even women to go to the temple. Sujan, by habit, waves to Pammuri. Ram Ram Pammu didi. Pammuri passes him by quietly, her eyes fixed at the horizon. “Hetna bhore bhore markit ja taaru?’ (are you going to the market so early in the morning?) Sujan said lightly and glanced at her bucket. A fish made a tiny jump for her life, her mouth opened to grasp some air as if the river was above her head. But she dropped back into the bucket, landing on the cushion made by the rest of the quivering fish. Sujan frowns but chooses not to stop her. Poor woman, growing mad after her daughter’s death. Pammuri quickens her pace but there is no sign of restlessness on her face. A tiny fly comes to rest on her chin, sitting on the triangulated kumkum on her face. A dog uncoils its body, shakes the dirt off and follows her. Soon, a clever bird, perhaps a crow will get behind her too. They are all anticipating some drama, some blood, some food.

#

Titli, like hundreds of thousands of people, died in the pandemic. But covid could hardly touch her before many other devils got to her. It started three months after the lockdown, precisely the time when the winds got cleansed of the pollution and filled with scents of cakes, sweets and the viral dalgona coffee. That is when Pammuri’s stock emptied out and she decided it was time to look for some work within the village. The town’s market was closed down. Nobody in the village bought fish from them. And they could not eat it themselves because it was the spawning season. Pammuri asked Panditayin for some work. Cleaning, washing, cooking, Pammuri would do anything. Panditayin spit aside, clutched her pallu nearer to her face as she poured water in the peepal and turned away. It was impossible to allow Pammuri to walk in the house with that swaying slutty braid and threaten her suhaag. But years of reading Ramayana had softened the Panditayin’s heart, as she liked to believe. She told Pammuri she could send Titli from the next day. Pammuri’s heart turned over in her chest. In retrospect, Pammuri will decide it was this moment when gods sealed her daughter’s fate. Pammuri spent the walk back home wondering how would she convince Titli to go to work? She had always kept Titli away from the villagers except for some friendly neighbours like brother Sujan and his family and fellow fisherwomen. Other than them, Pammuri considered everyone a group of vultures, ready to relish the taste of an untameable cat on her kitten’s skin. But she also needed money. There was no food for them, no alcohol for Murli and no savings for hypothetically sending Titli off to finish her college if ever the lockdown ceased. Titli shook her head frantically. I have to study. Murli ripped her book apart in a symbolic gesture of what he would later call, in his own defence, a gentle warning, a mild punishment by a brother to his wayward sister. Titli’s ghost would laugh somewhere and come to him in his dream. He is sitting on the village well and drinking with his friends the cheap beer they managed to sneak in from the border of Nepal. Then, his friends fly away one by one with the strong wind. He alone remains. He looks into the sky and catches the sight of a giant white bird falling towards him speedily with her wings open. He squeezes his eyes shut in fear and yells but his voice is drowned by the sudden weight. What he thought was a bird was actually a giant book which had now engulfed Murli entirely. But he would suffocate and die inside it, without ever knowing what it really was. Ignorance, and not death, would be his tragedy. Murli will wake up from the dream, in sweat and with a runny stomach.

#

The water in Titli’s eyes quivered. It is only for a few months, Pammuri explained to her softly. Nobody would give her widow mother any work. And who knows? Titli might impress the Panditayin with her shahri ghitpit, said Pammuri with a liquid smile. For a fraction of a second, she considered Titli’s mysterious power– her ability to evoke heat whenever and wherever she wanted– fortunate. It would protect her if she found herself in a vulnerable situation. What Pammuri failed to consider was that often, a power is not realized until someone points it out. Titli started going to Harindar pandit’s house and would not return a few hours before the sun went down. She would sweep the floors, clean the walls with cow dung, feed the cattle, wash the clothes, wash the dishes, massage amma’s legs, play with Panditayin’s grandchildren and spend whatever little in-between moments she would get, daydreaming about the ocean. At night, Pammuri would oil her hair and massage her feet, grateful for the silence while also feeling tormented by it. Despite being angry, Titli was kind to her mother. She looked at her mother’s face in the lamplight, mapped out the budding hints of wrinkles under her eyes and regretted writing in her diary that her life would have been better if she were a motherless child instead of being a fatherless one. Unfortunately for Pammuri, Titli would die before tearing that page off.

Titli soon stopped talking. She would come home, lie in bed and wouldn’t get up until it was the time to make rotis. She did not ask uneasy questions to Pammuri anymore, nor read her own books. She would not even talk back to Murli or frustratingly hit his legs when he would pass out drunk in his room. One day, when Murli’s friend Virendra came to see him, Titli’s face discoloured before she ran to her room. When Pammuri touched her, Titli’s hair crackled with charge, her head felt like a piece of burning coal in Pammuri’s hands. Titli looked up. All the water had come out on the surface. She wished she could unbody herself so she could think about other important things in life. This shame, it was not hers. This fault, it was not hers. This body, a mass of flesh that could be used against her own self, was not hers. Only memories, of violence and shock, belonged to her. She did not say anything to Pammuri. As intimate and open she fancied them to be with each other, there was a gulf of shame and fear neither of them crossed. When no question or consolation came, Titli said, “I don’t want to go to that house. Panditayin gives me too much work to do. And she constantly insults me. And the children sometimes piss on my skirt because their mother doesn’t take them to the bathroom.” And this. And this. Titli gripped Pammuri’s hand tightly. Maai– a call for help so faint Pammuri would pretend she did not hear it– em>and this. Pammuri assured Titli she would make some excuses after the end of the month.

“You cannot quit suddenly; there will be suspicions.” That was all Pammuri said.

But Titli was fragile, impatient in her own right. She had hoped that the only thing getting in the way of justice was her mother’s unawareness of the injustice. She did not say anything. She went for work quietly. A few days later, Virendra got down with chickenpox. He got boils all over his body. Harindar pandit scolded his weeping wife.

“Mataji has visited your son to bless him and you’re crying like a fool.”

Panditayin sobbed, “it is all her doing, that whore’s witch daughter.”

It was to be understood that Titli would not go to that house from the next day. Whenever Mataji possessed someone’s body in the village, their family made sure no polluting presence hovered around them, lest Mataji got angry. Titli came home that evening and put the money in Pammuri’s hand and said, “if Murli drinks away even a penny, I will kill myself.” She did not know what to do with all that rage, so she started packing her things.

“You should pray maai that the corona never goes away. Because once my college opens, I am never coming back to this filth.”

All her life, Pammuri had feared that poverty would take her dignity away and so she gathered it and put it in her daughter, for nobody could touch her dignity if it stayed with Titli. She did the same with her dreams. And now, they all lied broken inside her. I would come with you too, Pammuri wanted to say, if only for a few transitory moments of false joy. I would also like to see the ocean. The existence of such desire in the daughter is a proof that it once existed in the mother too. But she stayed quiet and hoped that Titli would forgive her in bed, for nights often brought reconciliation, when they would both fight, entangle their legs and sleep like sisters. Under the light of the lamp that night, Pammuri’s secrets peeked out from her eyes and danced like shadows on her face but Titli was looking away.

#

There is no ambiguity in the fact that Titli took her own life, that is what the villagers tell each other. Burning of a soul is not unheard of here. People with shameful secrets often died such deaths. The ambiguity lies in what secret did she harbour? A woman cannot have a private thought, not even in death. So, everyone desperately waits for a sign or a word, even a budding idea for a good story. It comes– rather painfully late– two days after the death rites are over, on a drunken night, when Virendra told his friend how his sister tried to cast a black magic on him. Or how she used all her inherited seduction skills on him. The remnants of their fight show on Murli’s and Virendra’s bodies the next day. People sigh in relief, like a dog at the sight of a juicy bone after eating all the meat. There is something to gnaw on, after all. Everyone starts claiming what they had seen or heard or felt about the whole affair between Virendra and Titli. She had cast a black spell on Harindar pandit’s married son. Or worse, she tried to touch him. Why else would Mataji bother to come out in corona and purify his body? That daughter of the stinking fish. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. At least, she had the decency to hide her face in the river.

What if Virendra did something- Sujan’s wife hushes him sharply. People might hear you. Let the girl’s soul rest in peace. As strong as Titli’s ghost is, it is still of a child. She is too tired to haunt so many people in their sleep. So, Pammuri would take upon that work. Titli told her she will never return back once the quarantine ends. She will earn money and call Pammuri to live with her too. Murli can drink away his worthless life. That is why Pammuri cannot believe that Titli has taken her own life. Her heart was still hopeful, dreaming about the white of the ocean and blue of the vast sky. How could a heart like that carry a dry soul? A girl dreaming of the ocean would not settle for a river, even if it is to free herself from a painful life.

#

The dog does not bark. The crow does not caw. They stand still in curiosity, ducking their heads right and left, as if on the watch. But Pammuri would not run away before she cuts every fish in stripes, slowly with the gentleness of a good fisherwoman. She wants to hold them until their smell mixes with hers. That stinking fisherwoman. She saves some pieces for the dog and the crow, taking them back with her, lest they eat the ones left behind at Harindar pandit’s gate. An hour later, Harindar pandit comes out to water the tulsi and notices that what he thought was the sound of wind rustling against drying clothes is the sound of struggle. More than hundred pieces of slaughtered fish are wriggling at his door. There are shreds of skin, feathers and scales everywhere. Strands of an elongated gill and a coil of entrails are hanging messily on the lemon and chilly on the nazar battu, the thread to cast the evil eye off. The leaves of the tulsi are dripping of fish blood in the mud. In the first light of the sun, the blood looks golden. Virendra’s motorbike that he got from his in-laws is lying down on one side of the door, where the road opens outside. It is soaked in crimson water, reeking of rotten fish. The leather of the seat is torn in places and filled with tiny jhinga, squirming at intervals. The younger fish are lapped in the blood of their mothers, letting go of the last of their breaths. The blood is sticky and makes a slippery sound near the tulsi plant. Harindar pandit sees his nephew sitting in the mud, whose face is glowing with the morning light as he giggles at the funny sight before him. The little boy’s pants are smeared with specks of brown and red as he sits adorably, biting on the smooth, silver belly of a fish whose eyes are bulging out, staring at Harindar pandit. He vomits and falls on the floor.

Somewhere on the other side of the village, in a poetic turn of events, a woman grabs the bag that her daughter once packed in rage, locks her son in the house and leaves. The sun is out now. People are out in the fields with their cattle. She can see a few women sitting on their rooftops, washing grains of wheat and bringing jars of pickles out to dry. A few passersby glance at her absent-mindedly. Soon, they will all look for her. Once she is certain that she has reached the far end of the village, she starts running. She knows they might catch up to her. Catch her by her long braid, drag her back to her roots and bury her in the barren soil of the village where no wild fruit or flower can bloom. But she will cross that bridge when it comes to it. For now, her feet are one with the wind, as if on fire. She can sense her daughter’s skin onto hers, its heat and tenderness that she got from her mother. Good. She should climb into her mother’s skin, for the ocean has some meaning only if they both see it together. She might get caught before she even leaves the station. But she will run now, with her daughter’s ghost on her back, who has spread her hands and transformed them into wings. They run, like two trees trying to catch a train.